Between the Bars
by end1essly
Summary: And she laughed, she laughed, she laughed, she laughed an unnatural type of laugh, as she remembered a night just like this, when they’d fallen off his bench and spooned together on his kitchen floor..... Oneshot. Not epilogue compliant.


**Disclaimer: Story inspired by the song "Between the Bars" by Elliot Smith. All rights go to him and J.K. Rowling for her characters. Thank you for reading.**

Between the Bars

She was halfway through her third vodka, but the pain… the lead weight that hung on her bones, her inflamed crusty eyelids, the burning sensation accompanying the slightest movement of her listless limbs, and the traitorous organ that continued to pump on and on… it kept her captive, despite the tasteless liquid that flowed down her throat, deceptively smooth. It was well into the night, that delicious hour in which reality melts into a hazy dream, the reruns on her television appearing as globs of moving, dazzling color. After all, there wasn't any point in letting sleep take her away, when the same routine would circle, the same endless day repeating and repeating and repeating, her lonely lost broken record.

She took another sip.

She was twenty-three, the type of girl that grandmothers gushed over, the type of girl that could have married her sweetheart from school and have a baby on the way, the type of girl who could have had the world at her feet once Harry Potter had exterminated the world of any miniscule remnant of Voldemort, the type of girl who would have never given a second glance to the likes of Draco Malfoy.

Instead, she worked endless hours at the Department for Magical Law Enforcement, the monotony and lack of traffic past her office at the end of the hallway gently whittling her demeanor down to silence. She'd last spoken three days before, when she brushed up against a man in the lift on the way home and felt obligated to apologize. She'd ran home the rest of the way and let the tears break their boundaries and glide over her heaving cheeks as she slid the deadbolt into place and became one with the dark wooden floor, her curls indistinguishable from the knots and bumps in the grain.

She made herself chant the same promises when she huddled in her tiny bed at night. _I will quit my job. I will stop by and see Harry and Ron this weekend. I will forget him._ But yet, when morning came, after she'd watched the minute hand rotate around and around, so quietly, such thoughts had evaporated from her mind like the condensation on her windowpane.

She drained the last lazy drops from the glass. When her hand moved the bottle to pour more, she watched, as if disattached, as the bottle kept pouring, the alcohol splashing on the floor and joining the lake of her tears. This time, it went down like licking flames, the dazzling flowers of color forcing her onto the floor, her bare back scuffing the old pine. And she laughed, she laughed, she laughed, she laughed an unnatural type of laugh, as she remembered a night just like this, when they'd fallen off his bench and spooned together on his kitchen floor.

But that time, it'd been whiskey, the finest around.

It did not matter that she had a case review due the next day. As the best friend of the Chosen One, such slipups were overlooked. It did not matter that she'd forgotten to pay the utilities. She was quite content in lying here in the dark. It did not matter that Harry and Ron had stopped calling, owling, visiting, wrapped up in their own successful lives. It was gratifying to see that they didn't lean so heavily upon her anymore.

_Find a man,_ he'd said, _a good man who can take care of you, who deserves you, who can make you infinitely happy, someone who isn't me._ And indeed, at first there had been offers, but she figured that their unreturned phone calls had put an end to such silly pipe dreams. It was pathetic, wasting away like this, she knew in the remains of her logical mind, but it was as if her soul had been sucked out whole, to join the fathomless depths of the unknown, along with his.

In the beginning she'd tried to resist, disposing of such painful memories in the Pensieve Harry and Ron had purchased for her one Christmas (did they know that such a harmless thing could be used for such insidious purposes?) But then it became her addiction, spending night after infinite night in her head, the Pensieve shards still lying in the bottom of her wastepaper basket. How could she have wanted to forget the woodsy sharp scent of his skin, his long fingers tracing the outline of her cheek, the way he'd spoke her name when she first realized he had savagely stolen her entire entity: her heart, body and spirit.

She'd thrown away the photographs of a past life, one with her head thrown back, laughing uproariously at a joke her once beloved father had cracked, one with a familiar ginger-colored feline, the last one to join the fire being of young students, tresses bright red, black and untidy, and brown and bushy. She'd sent her favorite one to his mother via a loaner owl, the creamy envelope keeping the ethereal strands of his hair and the bright silver of his eyes hidden from the world.

She couldn't stop drinking, even if she wanted. He was the only one who could ever keep her still.

Once she had visited in the middle of the night, her famous face disguised by the means of a cloak and the wayward shadows of a deep dark sky. He'd been sitting there calmly, as if he'd expected her to come this very moment, four months after being kidnapped from his bed, sentenced and thrown in this poor excuse for a new home. She threw up her arms, as if she could diffuse through his cell and absorb his beautiful body through the effort of her loving embrace. He'd laughed in that deep baritone that had formerly made her writhe in desire, his silver eyes glinting from the light of that mutinous beautiful moon.

_Baby, look at the stars, _he'd whispered, as her fingers entwined with his, the silence of the night shattered by the crazed squeal and cackle of a man several cells down. And so they had looked for hours as if they'd had all the time in the world (_two months, three days and seven hours left_), and were back in his garden, their bare bodies slick with sweat, her head buried in the smooth planes of his chest. How sweet his kiss had been, between the bars.

She did not bother with the glass this time, which joined the puddle with a tinkle, soon accompanied by the empty vodka bottle, her fingers drawing lazy circles in the wetness. The haze grew thicker, head lolling around on the floor, so that when the angry knocks came, followed by a flash of black hair, she was too far gone from this world to notice.

Slowly carefully unfortunately she awoke, the smell of disinfectant hitting her sensitive nostrils, the cacophony of beeping machines and Ron's snoring making her wonder if indeed, she had ended up in hell. Clenched in her fingers was the dirty scrap of a letter that she'd been holding close to her heart these past four years, the words he'd been unable to say as they dragged him away for that last time, that had been her bane.

_i love you._


End file.
